A rocket in flight forms a parabola and thus, implies an ellipse. It’s this implied ellipse, one being in the negative half of a four quadrant graph from the positive parabola of the rocket’s trajectory through the air, that forms two halves of an enclosed circle - the mandala, an egg-world containing all the things encompassed by the myth produced from Genius in the original sense of the term as the perfect author-function channeling an abstract subject such as a people or a time period. The author-function channeling this myth is the dreamer of genius, in this novel, Pirate Prentice, in his ability to take on the fantasies of the war and by extension, the transformative myth of the 20th century.
Two rockets and their opposite guardians, 00000 and 00001, for Blicero and Enzian respectively, form the two points of Y=0 on the quadrant axis. It’s these where traced is the overall structure of the novel, both the literal concept of a actual rocket and its opposite in a potential rocket, duplicated in the text’s structure, where an arc of a rocket is drawn over Europe and by extension, the structure. Beginning with an impact at +X,Y=0, a clockwise rotation first through the impacted, negative world of the allies and then through the positive, aggressing world of the axis.
The cycle always works by passing beyond some veil, with parallel underworlds and overworlds on the other side of the impassable line of 0. In one respect, this is death, the movement of transgression “Beyond the Zero” and into the other side of the world, in the form of the alien world entered in the hero’s journey. Enzian’s birth and resurrection from the veld that meant death and back to the village, coming to mind as demonstrating.
In a broader way, this cycle emerges, as all cycles do as being mechanical moreso than stable, with their movements using the subjects as mere functions. The Schwarzkommando return to Europe as America does, the colony coming back around to the colonizer to submit it to the same work of death. The work of death, Europe’s Kingdom of Death as its put, is explained not as being the material work of the rocket-city but something beyond - the wilderness, where the European man escapes from death, to bring death upon the world in the pursuit of life, savage natives, wild plants, coca, hemp, poppies.
This mechanic of death inflicted as an action of pursuit of life is shown further in the remark on the nature of humanity. Humanity was created in order to be a counter-revolution against the green life of the wilderness, humanity as a culling agent of death to restrain the chaos of life choking the plant - metal after fire and wood, in the Wuxing. Death and life thus come not as an alien product but a result of not just humanity, but of the self. Life is nature here, the human as they are in third person while death comes at the behest of the soul’s driving of that body - the self in itself is life, while the actions performed are death.
This dynamic is felt by Geli in her consorting with Pan in the wilderness, where in contacting the titans she recreates the old way of humanity, the dead within the world of the living, the European in Africa, the Africans in Europe. This is a closed loop, a broader mandalic cycle that makes up much of the text, both within the self, of knowing one to be both, but also of the two working across the same theme, such as colonialism, where the two do death unto each other by means of their simple mixing.
With death as the external actions of the self, death then becomes something which can be imposed in a regime, where the body is forced to act in ways alien to the desires of the self. This, known in philosophy as Biopower, forms the obsessions with systems where the death-bringer can create something such as Der Raketen-stadt or the dramas of the war (genius of the war, like Pirate’s dreams) Blicero holds Gottfried within. The self in these regimes is within a regime not of death-itself but a regime of reproducing death, as the self is not only bringing the same death that the self brings in its life, but is forced to bring death via the agendas of another.
This marriage, that between Blicero and Gottfried makes up the entirety of the zone. The wilderness is always unreachable and yet the pursuit of it will never cease. The Counterforce does such a thing, their hippie excesses degenerating into the final realization, of the circular unity. In seeking life, they practiced death until this loop spun so fast it made a circle and the holiness of both as one in the same was realized, to prompt the worship of the blood upon the grail, the blood as life and death, the closed-circle containing everything, the cosmic egg. Raised to the heavens, they sacrifice the counterculture by performing counterculture on itself, closing the loop between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971.
It’s this action, a mandala of death and life as being two aspects (inflow and outflow, if you will) of the self and all things, that the text is formed as a myth. Slothrop is the rocket, as is shown in the final few episodes, and his personhood marks the trajectory of life and death as it runs in a circle to enclose the matrix of the myth, where all the strands and tensions and histories and ideas are drawn together. Beginning after the rocket’s fall, in the world of the body (life), Slothrop journeys as a coherent person, putrid flesh like that of Brigadier Pudding’s sexual appetite. Arising at the rocket launch, parts three and four deal with the world of actions (death), where Slothrop’s body and self disintegrate until the text itself does, vignettes of pure image and action after all corporeal bodies of diegesis are resolved, until the rocket descends to finally impact, and the circle is closed, the arc beginning again.
No comments:
Post a Comment